Recently I was talking to a friend developer and he revealed to me that he had build a "free online games site" over a year ago and that today it was generating for him over $500/month from adsense.

Using my own search queries estimation tool or any other keyword suggestion tool you choose (overture, seobook, keywordtracker etc.) one can search for "games online" and see that there is an awful lot of searches on that and related terms. More that 2Million searches on the query "game online" alone for this month (according to the inventory of overture). People indeed do want to play flash games online, that is what this statistic tells us. Imagine how many other individualized searches (for specific games ...) go on that do not make it in the statistics.

I know that the competition is actually pretty big but still I want to experiment. Google shows a total of 466 Million pages on the term "game online" but if you divide with the average of 5000 pages an average game site has nowadays the number becomes something more manageable. Only 93200 game online sites exist as of this time. Not a big deal ;)

How do you build a game site ? Well for those that want to try this enterprise there are some scripts ready that come with games preinstalled. Some such scripts are the gamescript, flashgamescript, and AV arcade among many others. The scripts cost from 49.99 and 69.95 respectivelly for the first two and AV arcade is free to setup but it costs $20 for a bundle of games. So you are bound to spend some money to get started. Most business online or offline need some initial investment don't they ?

If you are serious about doing it you better have some nice hosting space as well since each game is 1 Mb in size on average. And you better have some nice bandwidth if the traffic does actually come your way.

To tell you the truth I installed the AV arcade for free and then searched for collection of arcade games on the digital point forums but it did take me 3 days only to download the games to my PC and then upload them to my server. Then I designed what I think is a decent template on it and started doing some link exchanges in order to get some ranking on the search engines.

I did actually spend some money (after all) buying some nice hosting with lots of space and bandwidth since I did not want to choke my other sites.